While I hadn't been with my partner for very long, I thought I knew what they looked like. Apparently not. Flicking through their Facebook I recoiled  sharply, provoking a less than impressed reaction. I felt I should explain. Looking at a photo of us together, I couldn't help but recognise myself (no amount of editing can make my nose more palatable). They, on the other hand, looked like nobody I immediately recognised. A harsh white light had flattened any depth of features, and given colour the kind of unwelcome intensity associated with a hangover. It was, I was immediately told, a great photo - and they looked hot in it. So there. This exchange, you'll all be thrilled to know, did not provoke a row of 'you-don't-even-know-what-I-look-like' proportions. However, the fact that my partner and I had such different conceptions of what they ought to look like in a photograph was bizarre to say the least.

The blame seems to lie squarely with Instagram. Touted as a means of photo sharing, it's principle use is really one of photo editing, with users able to apply any one of fifteen filters to their photos. These filters, with names spanning the globe from 'Valencia' to 'Nashville', allow budding photographers to create photos where lighting, focus and colour are fundamentally different from the original. These cosmetic effects often work to give the impression that photos have been taken in different times, places and even with different cameras. Depending on perspective, this readily available means of photoshopping either enhances or utterly distorts a photograph's power of expression. Regardless of these differing reactions, what is clear is that Instagram represents a wider trend of using the camera to present a reality which is most pleasing to photographer and audience.

This tendency, far from being of minor significance, is at odds with the founding principles of the camera and photography. The origins of the modern camera can be found in the camera obscura, 'a dark room, with a small hole in the wall or window shutter through which an inverted image of the view outside is projected onto the opposite wall or a white screen' (A Concise History of Photography). This principle of image projection was first noted by Aristotle and was primarily associated with viewing solar eclipses without damaging the eye: 'If the image of the sun at the time of an eclipse...passes through a small round hole on to a plane surface opposite, it will be crescent shaped' (Book of Optics). Hence from the camera's earliest conception, its value was located in its ability to offer a glimpse at a reality which was otherwise inaccessible to the human eye. 

The camera obscura eventually became known as a tool for accurate drawing, with Giovanni Battista della Porta recommending it for this use in 1558: 'If you cannot paint, you can by this arrangement draw with a pencil...This is done by reflecting the image downwards onto a drawing-board with paper' (from his Magiae naturalis). As the camera obscura shrank in size from 'a dark room'  to being able to fit in the head of a walking stick, it became a valuable tool in the sketching of portraits, landscapes and interiors. Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy, even had one disguised as a book. Having initially been used a means of viewing inaccesible reality, the camera obscura was now being used as a means of faithfully depicting that reality. The freeing of reality from the inadequacies of the human hand and its faithful depiction was, then, the goal of early photographic endeavour, a pursuit testified to by Tiphaigne de la Roche in his work Giphantie: 'you have a picture the more valuable in that it cannot be imitated by art'.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the capacity of the camera to depict a reality outside of our perception came under renewed attention by early film makers. One such film maker was the Soviet director Dziga Vertov, whose films —  such as Kino-eye (1924) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) — have the revelatory power of the camera as their focus. Scenes such as the stop-start motion of horses running and the slaughter of a cow shown in reverse demonstrate the power of the camera in accessing and presenting a reality which the eye (with a frame rate of 10-12 images per second) is unable to see. Such powers are not limited to the motion camera, with Paul Nicklen's 2012 winning entry in the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photography Competition being a shot of emperor penguins frozen in mid-motion underwater. This superior power of the camera in capturing the real is given eloquent expression in Vertov's Kinoks: A Revolution: 'I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.'

This power of the camera in depicting a reality outside of our control has governed the moral, as well as the technical, preoccupations of photography. Nowhere is this clearer than in the genre of war photography. While often subject to manipulation for the purposes of propaganda — as the authenticity debate surrounding Robert Capa's The Falling Soldier clearly demonstrates — war photography has generally had as its object the depiction of those human realities of war which are often overlooked or unknown. Perhaps some of the best known examples of modern war photography come from the Vietnam War and include Eddie Adam's photo of a Vietcong officer being executed with a shot to the head and Nic Ut's photo of a naked girl fleeing a Napalm attack. Both the prominence of war photography within popular culture, and its ability to galvanise public opinion, demonstrate that photography's depiction of otherwise unseen realities has so far constituted its expressive power.

With the advent of photoshopping, made manifest in Instagram, this role is being challenged. Far from presenting a reality which must be encountered on its own terms, the photography which such editing allows depicts a reality of the photographer's own design, whose capacity to challenge is largely negated. Moreover, a quick survey of photos typical of Instagram shows that they have been filtered in such a way as to age them, to place them outside of the time in which the photo was actually taken. In the place of potent realities, popular photography seems to be concerned with manufactured memories. What this suggests is that photography no longer finds its power in the ability to present a challenging reality, but in numbing the effects of a dissatisfying reality.

In seeking to edit photos with a specific focus on their use as momentos of the past, it seems fair to argue that Instagram is so popular because it enables users to change the record of the past so that it resembles a reality which is more worthwhile. This dissatisfaction is all the more evident when photos from blogs such as 'Rich Kids of Instagram' and 'Rapperz of Instagram' — with some particularly glorious contributions from Rick Ross with a tree sized bud — all captured in glossy tones, make up a body of archetypes which users seek to emulate in their own uploads. In this way Instagram seems to share a similarity with religious iconography, where the value of an icon is based on its resemblance to the original event or person which inspired it. In this light, the seemingly democratic mass aesthetic which dominates Instagram and is perpetuated by its users is not democratic at all, but coercive. Users create photos which will be seen as adhering closest to the example of these prototypes, and hence will be best received by the Instagram community. This obsession with a photo's reception is easy to discern in the tendency to give tags to photos which have nothing to do with the photo at all, much like with videos on Youtube.

Yet if this tendency has dissatisfaction as its cause, it must surely have dissatisfaction as its product as well. Reminiscing over photos is often rewarded with a slight bitterness caused by the simple fact that the reality in the photograph exists no longer. Yet perhaps with Instagram, reminiscence will bring a different disappointment altogether. Rather than being able to experience the bittersweet effects of nostalgia, users face the possibility of not being able to recognise the moment captured in the photograph. Taken and edited in order to be enjoyed at a future time and by a future self, these photos do not represent the reality as experienced, but reality as desired. Not only then will users face an unpleasant lack of recognition of the reality in question, they may indeed only recognise the dissatisfaction which gave the photo its purpose in the first place.